Call Nurse Jenny (34 page)

‘Geoffrey, don’t go.’

She waited. Then very slowly he closed the door and came back into the room.

She had got through her finals, she was a State Registered Nurse at last. Jenny telephoned her mother, then armed with a four-hour pass went out to celebrate in a local pub with the others of her group who had passed.

‘What d’you plan to do now?’ asked mousy-haired Molly Fergusson who’d become her best friend. Everyone was asking the same question of each other.

Sipping her third Sanderman’s sherry, Jenny thought about that one. The idea of applying for the QAIMNS/R made itself felt again. This time she would apply. Mumsy would be distressed, but she needed some of that freedom she had always dreamed about, which even becoming a nurse had not as yet fulfilled. It meant she could be sent abroad; she couldn’t help it but somehow the idea identified her with Matthew, silly fool that she was. When would she ever grow up?

She knew of course that he was a prisoner of war. Susan walking out on his parents as she had, knowing how things stood, had to her mind been a terrible thing to do. Now she lived with some rough family off Mile End Road rather than the nice home into which she had been so generously accepted. Susan must have been off her head. But it was none of her business. She had to get on with her own life. And how often had she told herself that as soon as Matthew came into mind? As he came to mind now, so she pushed the thought away and told Molly of her plans.

‘Watch it,’ Molly said ominously. ‘They could send you anywhere.’

But she was adamant now. It was what she wanted, to be sent anywhere. It was what had happened to Matthew. And she was thinking of him again. All these years and she still thought of him.

Quickly she stopped thinking of him. Even so, she applied, and soon found herself saying goodbye to all the friends she’d made at the London Whitechapel, except for Molly who having readily told her to watch it, had decided to go with her. It felt good to have someone, not exactly to hold her hand, but to be a support in a corner, to be in the same boat with. Paddling one’s own canoe could be all very well, but a lonely business, and Molly had become a good friend. It would have been hard to say goodbye to her.

‘I feel a bit guilty leaving here at a time like this,’ Jenny confided. Air raids had begun again, this time more concentrated, the bombs heavier and more destructive. Dispirited Londoners who’d thought they’d seen the end of the Blitz called it the little Blitz; almost as many victims were being brought into the London as before. The second front was still being talked about, but this time everyone knew it would come soon. Guilty feelings or not, she was determined nothing should stop her now, visions of being sent overseas filling her mind.

‘Adventure at last,’ she said, shrugging off feelings of guilt.

‘Aye, adventure at last,’ Molly Fergusson agreed.

Conditions overseas could be uncomfortable, Jenny was told at her interview. She didn’t mind. She could be sent anywhere. She didn’t mind. A medical was followed by a lengthy shopping list, with her expected to pay for the items it contained.

‘We’ll be out of pocket a whole month at least,’ she grumbled. ‘I never considered us needing these things.’

They were items that very few of the nursing recruits had considered: folding camp bed and bedroll; a collapsible canvas bath, wash bowl and bucket; gumboots; portable paraffin stove. Even the uniform, grey suit and greatcoat with scarlet facings, a change of grey shirts and ties, hat, a change of grey cotton dresses, cape trimmed with scarlet, a lawn veil, had to be bought. Her mother generously sent her a bit of money to help out along with her laments at her daughter no longer coming home most evenings – not coming home at all. She was in the forces, it hadn’t properly registered until now. She’d be called sister. Nursing Officer J. Ross number T/348509. And she and Molly were to be sent off to a military hospital somewhere in England. So much for going abroad.

In fact they ended up in Essex, at a large manor called Hamdon Hall, now a military hospital in a village of the same name – far from being hundreds of miles from home, she could have cycled there!

New Year’s Eve, like Christmas, had been wonderful, the house filled to overflowing with all the Crawley family: friends, relatives, mostly women and children or men too old to have been called up, a sprinkling of uniforms of those who had been lucky enough to be home on short leave. The New Year seen in, the party had lasted until around one in the morning, until slowly growing stale and dwindling as one after another relatives yawned, remembered their own homes, minds on a cup of cocoa and bed. Now they had all gone. All were living close by and did not need to stay the night.

In the now-quiet kitchen surrounded by the debris of the party while Emma said goodnight to the last of them at the door, loath to see them go, when she would have to come back and face the clearing up, yapping away with them in the silence of the freezing early hours of 1944, Geoffrey gave Susan a long, searching look.

‘Fancy a nightcap? There’s some whisky left, or a drop of port.’

She shook her head. ‘I think I’ve had enough.’

She started to leave but he took hold of her hand. ‘Look, Sue, I’m sorry about the other day.’

She wanted to say, ‘
I’m
not,’ but she wasn’t even sure about that. It had been so wonderful, then afterwards so wretched knowing what she’d done, and then she had wanted it to happen all over again. She ended up saying, rather stupidly, ‘Emma must have wondered why you was so long delivering the Christmas presents.’

‘Probably reckoned I was just chatting,’ he mused. He moved nearer to her. ‘Are you sorry about what happened?’

It was a direct question, one she couldn’t answer except to give a small shrug, her eyes lowered. Taking her silence for collusion, he drew her gently to him. ‘I love you, Sue.’

His breath smelled of alcohol. She held herself stiff in his embrace. Any moment Emma would be back in, her goodnights said. Fear made her body grow even more tense. ‘You don’t,’ she whispered. ‘You had too much to drink that day. You’ve had too much to drink tonight. We mustn’t …’

He put a hand gently over her mouth. ‘I love you. I can’t remember when it started. All those times I sat in your room I could hardly keep from taking hold of you and kissing you and telling you how I felt. But you gave me no encouragement – no sign. I knew how you felt about your husband so I didn’t dare … I wouldn’t muck you about, Sue. You’re too nice for that. But that day, when you asked me not to go, knowing by then how I felt …’

He let his words drift off, his hand falling away from her mouth. In his arms she felt limp. ‘But I don’t love you,’ she managed to say. She had to be honest with him. But what was honesty? What was truth? ‘I was lonely.’

The strength went out of his clasp on her, his tone took on a touch of harsh disappointment, bitterness. ‘And I came in handy.’

‘No.’ She heard Emma call out a last goodnight, the night air making her call sound flat and far away. She would stand watching her guests until they disappeared into Mile End Road, a woman so full of demonstrative affection that she couldn’t bear to let those she was fond of fade from sight until forced to by the intervention of something like a street corner. There were a few more minutes left before she came back indoors. Meanwhile Susan gabbled what she needed to say to Geoffrey.

‘That’s the trouble, all I could think about was you, you near me and the wonderful feeling it gave me. I should’ve thought about my husband, but I didn’t. He’s like a dream – something that never really happened.’

‘Then why hold me off?’ He too was talking fast, knowing his wife would be back any moment.

‘Because,’ she said, ‘I don’t know how I feel – if I was trying to put you in his place … Geoffrey, I could let you love me, easy as anything. But I must have time to think.’ Any minute now Emma would be back indoors. Susan pulled free of the hand still holding her wrist. ‘You must leave me alone, Geoffrey. And don’t come upstairs to see me any more, please.’

The street door scraped to and closed with a tortured grating thud. The wood had swollen in the damp winter weather. Susan fled to the kitchen door and stumbled past Emma coming along the unlit passage.

‘You all right, Sue?’ came the startled voice.

‘Just want the lav,’ she mumbled, making for the stairs. ‘Think I’ll go straight to bed.’

‘It’s all that beer – makes yer run. Wanna nightcap? Tea? Cocoa?’

‘No thanks.’

Reaching her door she stumbled into her room. Closing the door she leaned against it. Her body felt like an empty sack as she let herself slide to the floor to give herself over to weeping, ceasing only when Mattie stirred in her cot, dreaming, giving a small whimper.

For three months they hadn’t moved from where they had been quartered. In huts erected in the grounds of Hamdon Hall, in the depths of January and February and March, they looked forward earnestly to the warmer spring weather. With the second front still being talked about, they treated cuts and bruises on men returning from training manoeuvres, saw to fingers squashed in lorry bonnets, dosed sore throats, winter colds, caught colds themselves and dosed each other.

‘Fun, don’t ye think?’ Molly said, her nose red and sore from the constant application of unforgiving hankies. Jenny chuckled and wiped her own tender nose. Molly was a tonic. Always jolly, always looking on the bright side, a girl to turn every soldier’s eye. She was tall, like Jenny herself, but whip-thin, and looked as though the smallest breeze would knock her sideways. Like all women with such figures she looked wonderful in her smart grey and scarlet uniform, whereas Jenny saw herself as doing her uniform no justice whatsoever despite the appreciative remarks of the soldiers about the colour of her hair and the lovely grey-green of her eyes. She took it with a pinch of salt. They’d pay compliments to any nurse in uniform attending their trivial medical complaints.

So their lives continued, spring sunshine lifting the spirits as they went on occasion to the local pictures in nearby Chelmsford, attended the village fête at Easter, went to the community hall dance that had once only catered for a sprinkling of villagers but now was crammed with a variety of uniforms, hospital staff, and patients. Molly hardly ever danced with the same man twice; she went into town on the arm of every Tom, Dick and Harry. Jenny did the same but somehow could never allow herself to get close to any one man, so she supposed she too lingered on every Tom, Dick and Harry’s arm and it was an ever-changing foursome that marched off into Chelmsford for an evening at the pictures or a better-class dance at the town hall.

The next two months passed like a dream, surrounded by the gentle warmth of the Essex countryside, by contentment, comradeship, and all the while learning ever more of the skills and requirements of her chosen career. At last she was forgetting to think about Matthew. This was a different life, her old life and all its sense of confinement and commitment left far behind. As for the yearning to go overseas, although the QAs were an overseas division of nursing, it seemed this was where they would remain for the duration of the war.

Things, however, were to change. Towards the end of May the whole unit of QAs upped stakes and moved to outside Deal in Kent to meet a mounting stockpile of ammunition, military vehicles and chaos. They got fitted out with sloppy dungaree-like garments, heavy boots, webbing, respirator and haversack, raincape-cum-groundsheet and all the other paraphernalia that was designed to hang around the frame of military personnel.

Miles from anywhere, for the last weeks of May life assumed a state of utter immobility beyond the vast camp site with its growing mass of men and military machinery. The first week of June began wet and windy, the wind at times whipping to gale force, making life under canvas more than miserable.

Emerging from the prefabricated canteen that first Tuesday in June to a newly washed morning after the gales of the previous few days, Jenny became aware of a low and steady distant roar that made every girl look up, wonderingly. Within seconds the distant roar was filling the air.

‘Christ! Look at that!’ Molly’s voice had to screech over the growing racket.

As though being raised on a vast curtain, a cloud of dark shapes had begun to loom over the tree-tops from the west. Bearing down on the awed, open-mouthed watchers below – the whole hospital had turned out to see what the thunderous noise was all about, the building itself being shaken by the weight of it – wave after wave of planes began to pass overhead. Each bomber towed a glider, Halifaxes, Lancasters, Blenheims, the huge Flying Fortresses, moving almost wingtip to wingtip in steady purposeful majesty, deceptively slow, forming a virtual ceiling above the upturned faces.

‘It’s the second front,’ shrieked Molly, the deafening roar practically carrying her voice away. ‘It’s started. At last!’

But with the last waves of planes receding into the distance, silence descending strangely upon ears still ringing from the earlier noise, Jenny and Molly looked at each other, as did all the women of their unit.

‘We’ll probably be following them soon,’ Molly said, serious for once.

Obeying her wishes, Geoffrey hadn’t visited her room again. Downstairs he was polite to her as though nothing had ever occurred between them. Weeks stretched to months; for Susan it was a most miserable time. The colder he seemed towards her, the warmer he appeared to become towards his family, playing with his boys far more than she was sure he once did whenever he was home. He was good with Mattie too, bouncing her on his knee until she chuckled fit to burst, but not one warm glance did he cast towards herself. She ached for him to give her just one look that said he too remembered Christmas Eve in her room and yearned to repeat it.

Even Emma noticed. ‘You done somefink ter upset Geoff?’ she asked. When Susan raised her shoulders sullenly without offering any explanation one way or the other, he laughed, assuring Emma he was being a perfect gentleman to their tenant, the innuendo not escaping Susan who wanted to burst into tears and tell him that if anything he was behaving perfectly rotten to her.